Friday, April 03, 2015

Johnson again, or getting near what I set out to say, but not saying it

For he taught them asone having
authority, and not as the scribes.

There’s a famous story about the first time William Hogarth
met Samuel Johnson. It happened when Hogarth was visiting Samuel Richardson:

“While he [Hogarth] was talking, he perceived a person standing
at a window in the room, shaking his head and rolling himself about in a
strange ridiculous manner. He concluded that he was an idiot whom his relations
had put under the care of Mr Richardson, as a very good man. To his great
surprise, however, this figure stalked forwards to where he and Mr Richardson
were sitting, and … displayed such a power of eloquence, that Hogarth looked at
him with astonishment, and actually imagined that this idiot had been at the
moment inspired."

”

Hogarth’s testimony to the
strangeness of Johnson’s presence, even to the extreme of thinking, at first
impression, that he was a congenital idiot, is not idiosyncratic. Famously, Johnson ate behind a screen at his
friend Mrs. Thrale’s house, due to the fact that he was a notoriously sloppy
eater. This was not due to some viciousness of his upbringing, but to some deep
malfunction of his physiology. Johnson seems to have been afflicted with
something ‘daemonic”, which has been variously diagnosed as Tourette’s
syndrome, or epilepsy, or whatever it is that scrofula was – since scrofula was
the diagnosis of his age. He was a man of tics, a man who could never totally
trust his own gestures. For this reason I
like to thinki of him in terms of the daemon: and this is all the more
appropriate in that he could only have lived in the eighteenth century, with
its interpenetration of Enlightenment sensualism and Mesmeric mystery. It was
an age has features that only come out
when looked at through the daemon. It was in a rented room in a house in
Johnson’s London that Swedenburg, a man Johnson never met, I think, also met
his daemon, or his angels, who threw him bodily around the place – and a
working class artist, William Blake, met his there too. Curious how Johnson
certainly seems on the other end of the spectrum from Blake, and yet it is easy
to imagine Johnson having the kind of tolerance for Blake that he had for
Christopher Smart.

Johnson’s prose is famously
mannered – like Gibbon, Johnson never met a contrast that he didn’t want to set
in prose marble. However, his conversation, as recoreded by Boswell and others,
was a more darting affair. And yet, his acquaintances recognized his voice in
the Rambler. Those wonderfully balanced sets, which seem so attached to pen and
paper rather than tongue and gesture, were , apparently, rooted in the latter –
it is as though the “Sir” which Boswell’s Johnson so copiously initials his
responses and speeches, that term of address
in which respect and attack are mingled , seems to dance, unsounded,
over those paragraphs that Hazlitt, later, would find all too balanced, and all
too indiscriminating as between occasions for high style and occasions for low
notice:

“We can no more distinguish
the most familiar objects in his descriptions of them, than we can a well known
face under a huge painted mask. The
structure of sentences, which was his own invention, and which has been
generally imitated since his time, is a species of rhyming in prose, where one
clause answers to another in measure and quantity, like the tagging of
syllables at the end of a verse. The close of a period follows as mechanically
as the oscillation of a pendulum, the sense
is balanced with the sound; eacch sentence, revolving round its centre
of gravity, is contained with itself like a couplet, and each paragraph forms
itself into a stanza.”

Yet Hazlitt is, like
everybody else, enchanted by Boswell’s Johnson, and makes a distinction between
the writer and the speaker. The latter spoke as though he had cast off fear,
while the former wrote as if any errant sound would plunge him into the abyss.

Yet we have the testimony of
his friends that The Rambler did sound like Johnson. His voice was in it.
Perhaps Hazlitt was showing his own dread of the grotesque when he compared the
writing to a huge painted mask – exaggeration, the wild growth of some familiar thing, is one of the tropes of the
gothic, and of horror. And though Hazlitt is trying to show that the famously
juggled style is, in the end, as boring as a metronome, his comparisons betray
perhaps another more sweeping and painful anxiety, in which the problem is not
that the prose is forgetable, but that it sets up an irritating vibration in
the head, which is catching – one’s own voice can be infected by this sound.

Authority is the sign of the daemonic
in traditional society. In Matthew, Jesus is said to speak with exousia –
authority – while Paul uses the word in a curious way when he writes that the
headcovering of women in the temple is there exousia – their authority to
preach. Authority is evidently power, but not any kind of power. To know that
of which one speaks is a kind of power, the kind granted to any classroom
lecturer whose prepared his or her notes. That is the power of the scribe.
Cultic authority is something of which one can be sensible – it can prickle the
hair on the back of your neck – without one knowing entirely what is in back of
it. Socrates’ daemon was wholly negative – it closed down avenues of thought
and discourse.This is not necessarily because they were unethical or illogical.
In Plutarch’s dialogue about the daemon,
the participants arrive at no clear notion of what it was – whether it was a
sense for omens or whether it was a voice. Surely, however, Socrates felt it
was an authority.

This, to my mind, binds
together the talk in Boswell’s Johnson with the great essays. Contra Hazlitt, the Tatler and Spectator of
Addison and Steele, which he admired so much, have become merely dim references
to fill out a tale about the coming of public opinion in early modern Europe –
a terrible fate, that, to be a dog’s dinner for Habermas. But Johnson’s essays grow more enigmatic. He
does have a bulldog’s way of shakng a bone – and the bones he preferred were
the standard tropes of the moraliste – self love, hypocrisy, vanity, folly,
etc. But he had a strong sense that the drama that the moraliste made out of
sentiments and vices was a puppet show, and that the real broke down the
puppets sooner or later, as one sounded the depths about what one knew to be
true of oneself and others, which means sounding the depths of what one doesn’t
know about oneself and others. Where does this irrepresible ignorance, this
internal illusion, come from? It is
Johnson’s constant theme; and a theme, if obsessed over with enough genius,
becomes a form of authority, though it resolves itself in the indeterminacy of
an enigma. God is a problem whose resolution is another problem, Novalis once
wrote: and such problems all are lit with something divine, or daemonic.

This is the kind of thing
that Johnson knows best. It is why he is the master of procrastination, that
moment when knowledge confronts its essential helplessness before the fact that
it transforms nothing, that it dissolves into a ghost if it isn’t the pawn of
desire. He turns these moments into existential acts – acts of the highest
futility.

“To act is far easier than to
suffer; yet we everyday see the progress of life retarded by the vis inertia,
the mere repugnance to motion, and find multitudes repining at the want of that
which nothing but idleness hinders them from enjoying. The case of Tantalus, in
the region of poetick punishment, was fomewhat to be pitied, because the fruits
that hung about him retired from his hand ; but what tenderness can be claimed
by those who, though perhaps they suffer the pains of Tantalus, will never lift
their hands for their own relief ?”

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.